Chapter XXII: It did not feel cold to Jim

He was conscious that there was a violent and spiteful wind blowing, cutting off the tops of the trees and ravaging the life of the hedges; but he was glad of something to struggle against. What would have been hard to bear was a day in which beauty taunted his heart.

He could share the life of the stripped and fading leaves flying before the wind like tormented people in a panic, but he could not have borne their gay security.

The whipped, low fields were as empty as his desolate heart.

There was no visible sky; only a dull, gray void filled with the unfriendly clamour of the air. Nothing had any purpose; the wind beat down on the earth with the unreasoning hysterical repetition of a scold.

This was where Jim belonged, out of doors, in a cold world, struggling; it had all been a mistake to put him into a beautiful, soft house, with dressed-up people who didn’t understand facts.

Education? What had he got out of it? He had learned how to have his feelings hurt without being cold or hungry or knocked about. These things were bad, but he was used to them. Having his feelings hurt was worse. It would have been much better not to have learned feelings.

He turned his head away from the field path which led to the square-towered church—the memory of his hours there was like the sting of a whip-lash across his cheek.

What was the use of going to a church that pushed you out into the cold when you most needed help? It was bad enough not having given him the benefit of a doubt, but even if they had had no faith in him, couldn’t they have held on to him?

Jim’s mind rushed ceaselessly round its core of grief, returning with the persistence of a robbed bird to its empty nest.

Their main idea was to get rid of him—to get rid of Emily—to get rid of trouble. They had begged the question of life. Pain beat upon Jim’s heart with the hammer-like ferocity of a toothache. The weight of it was on him, and the loneliness.

It is a mistake to believe that sensitiveness to pain is a sign of weakness. Weak natures respond more readily to pain, but never so deeply; it is only the strong who feel the full weight of a storm.

Jim had not forgotten Arthur, but all his incentives had for the moment weakened. He could not think easily of anything but Mrs. Bligh.

It is a cold business to part with an illusion, especially if you are not supple to illusion, and it has grown into your very soul with roots deeper than fact.

Jim set his mind doggedly upon the elusive figure of Mrs. Bligh. The veil of the temple was rent in twain; and what was destroyed in her took part of himself with it.

His first youth went with her supremacy; and all his dreams.

He saw that the virtues which he so loved in her—her common sense, her dignity and self-control—were, after all, only miniature virtues. She had evaded the two overwhelming qualities which sometimes seem more like sins than graces—love and compassion.

It was hard for Mrs. Bligh not to see that she was right, and the church had made it harder. By keeping all its rules she believed that she was obeying the law of God. She judged herself, and without leniency, by the church’s standard.

She also judged others; she had just enough mercy to forgive the kind of faults she could have committed herself, but unfortunately they were not very many.

All the big questions of the sin-racked world had escaped her. She had had ceremonies instead of humanity.

Priesthood and sacraments, what were they in this broken world so full of tyrannies and sins? They did not take the place of oil and wine, or pay for ruined travellers at an inn.

Hadn’t the church taken the presence of God out of the human heart and poked it into a mouse-trap?

What was left for a boy of nineteen whose mind could grasp these problems, and who had learned better than to get drunk?

It occurred to Jim that he would rather not go back to Arthur—even Arthur was educated and a gentleman. The river was still there, and the skipper would be sure to welcome him. Jim had five shillings in his pocket; and he didn’t want any more education; it was too expensive.

Drink, breed, and rot! Life was much simpler if you looked at it like that and didn’t have any fine feelings. You got something out of it then. You got what there was. But you didn’t get all there was.

It was much simpler; but was it any more honest than Mrs. Bligh sending Emily to a Sisterhood?

Mrs. Bligh hadn’t been able to shuffle out of the baby, and Jim couldn’t shuffle out of his own soul. He knew there was something in him, now, that being on a barge wouldn’t satisfy.

He would have to go on and make the best of it; even if making the best of it pulled him every which way. He set his teeth and pushed steadily on into the storm.

Jim was beginning to be tired now; the wind dropped and snow fell, at first desultory in occasional soft flakes, and then closing in with cold persistent fingers, blotting out the world.

Now and then Jim caught a glimpse of a group of farm buildings; once he passed through a village in which nothing moved.

The gray winter dusk was like the withdrawing of human consciousness when the blood runs thin, with faint, uneven pulses, and the sight of the eyes grow blurred and dim. Only the white, hard road was plain, winding interminably toward London.

He plunged suddenly over the brow of a hill into a beech forest; the giant trees stood like the pillars of a cathedral, with their interlaced branches forming a roof over his head.

There was no sound anywhere.

He stood quite still under the silent trees, as if there was no point in going on any more.

Life was not satisfactory; it did not substantiate its promises. It muddled things—a reformatory with the world a garden beyond iron doors—and when you got into the garden, you found that the iron was still there.

Jim could not see any point in the judgments of God. He could not see, in anything that happened to him, anything very much like God.

He could have loved Christ; but Christ was crucified so very long ago.

It would be much better to stop thinking and curl up under the trees. Even if there was a God, He couldn’t expect a boy to go on swimming for ever in a fog. Jim’s body was ceasing to obey him. He seemed to be carrying all the weight of it in his thoughts. It was like being drowned again; only the safety seemed farther off.

But there was still something warm and savage in his heart that refused this last surrender. He possessed a quality tougher than life if he could only get hold of it.

He said Arthur’s name over and over to himself to goad his body forward. When he tried to walk he reeled, but the unsteadiness of his limbs did not last long.

He became curiously conscious that he was no longer alone. Once or twice he looked behind him to see if some one was not by his side. There was no sound of footsteps, but there was a sense of companionship.

He moved safely out of the trees before the darkness caught him. The feeling of cold and loneliness decreased in the open road; it was as if Arthur’s spirit had not waited for Jim’s return to join him.

There are some human intimacies in which the soul knows that it need take no thought for the morrow, and can be at rest without explanations.

Such friendships are rare; they can exist without sentiment and with none of the rufflings of passion. They thrive on criticism, and disaster does not confuse them.

The breath of their life is equal liberty.

Jim did not give a thought as to how he should tell Arthur what had happened, but the knowledge that he should see him at his journey’s end was like warming his frozen hands at a fire. All through the last heavy, plodding miles, wet through, with only the mechanical unfreshened strength of his second wind, his spirit felt accompanied.

At last he reached the little smoky town above the river, where Arthur lived. Lights came again, broken and flickering, and voices.

As Jim caught at the door of Arthur’s home all his strength went out of him suddenly like water. He had a strange, bewildered feeling that eternity slipped between his knock at the door and any answer.

Then Arthur’s housekeeper stood there looking at Jim curiously, her face distorted with tears and excitement. For a moment she looked at him without recognition; then she cried out suddenly,—

‘Why, it’s young Mr. James! Haven’t you heard?’

Jim’s eyes fixed themselves on her beseechingly; he knew that when people say, ‘Haven’t you heard?’ they always mean something terrible.

‘Come in! Come in!’ she said distractedly. ‘’Is last words were,—

‘“Bring him in at once, Alice, and keep something hot on the fire till he comes.”

‘The doctor said as ’ow it was ’eart failure, along of ’is walkin’ miles in a wind on an empty stummick to christen a baby over at Crayford way that was took with fits.

‘’E just come in and opened the telegram to say as ’ow you was a-walkin’ over from the gentleman you was staying with—and I was a-standing at the door, as I am now, only it was ’is study door, and I’d boiled an egg for ’is tea, and ’e says, “Bring ’im in at once, Alice, and keep something hot till he comes,” and then ’e looks up past my ’ead, as if ’e ’eard some one a-calling of ’im, and just fell over as you might knock a vawse off the table with the back of your ’and!

‘But for the Lord’s sake come in and sit down, Mr. James, or we shall ’ave another corpse in the ’ouse before the morning.’

Jim groped his way in mechanically. His eyes were dazzled with light, and his mind refused to take the first sense of what had happened.

He could not have lost everything he had. Death was preposterous and incredible. It was like putting your foot down where there was nothing.

‘I’ve got to tell him what’s happened,’ he muttered, drawing down his sullen eyebrows.

‘Poor boy! ’Is ’ead’s completely turned,’ said Alice, hurrying away to get some food. ‘An’ no wonder—walkin’ twenty miles through a snowstorm, and this at the end of it! Providence do seem fond of a queer turn sometimes, and no mistake!’

‘I’ve got to tell him what happened,’ Jim repeated firmly to himself, and then darkness crept over him, a darkness more complete than any physical loss—the darkness of a world in which there is no one to whom you can tell what has happened.